  On the 6th of the following July, Lilly Becker and Albert Penny were married. The day dawned one of those imperturbable blues that hang over that latitude of the country like a hot wet blanket steaming down. The corn belt shriveled of thirst. The automobile had not yet bitten so deeply into the country roads, but even a light horse and buggy traveled in a whirligig of its own dust. St. Louis lay stark as if riveted there by the Cyclopean eye of the sun. For twenty-four hours the weather vanes of the great Middle West stood stock-still while July came in like a lion. The city slept in strange, improvised beds drawn up beside windows or made up on floors, and awoke enervated and damp at the back of the neck. Throughout the Becker household, however, the morning moved with a whir, the newly installed telephone lifting its shrill scream, delivery wagons at the door, the horses panting under wet sponges and awning hats, Georgia wide-eyed at the concurrence of events. For the half-dozenth time that morning Mrs. Becker suffered a little collapse, dropping down to the kitchen chair or hall bench, fanning herself with the end of her apron. "I'm dead! Another day like this will finish me. Georgia, have you polished the door bell? Those delivery boys finger it up so. I'm wringing wet with prespiration. If only there is a breeze in the church to-night. Georgia, if that is Mr. Albert on the telephone, tell him Miss Lilly isn't going to leave her room until noon. No, wait. I want to speak to him myself. Hello, Albert? Well, bridegroom, good morning!… What's left of me is fine…. I'm making her stay in her room. Poor child, she's all nerves. Don't be late. I hate last-minute weddings. Did you see the item in the morning Globe?… Yes, the name is spelled wrong, Pen-nie, but there's quite a few lines. 'In lieu of a honeymoon,' it goes on to say, 'the young couple will go to housekeeping at once in their new home, 5199 Page Avenue, directly across from the parents of the bride.' I'm sending over now to have all the windows opened so it won't be stuffy for you to-night. Wait until you see the presents, Albert, that came this morning. A check for five hundred dollars all the way from her uncle Buck in Alaska. That makes six hundred in checks. Three beautiful clocks, a dozen berry spoons from my euchre club, and an invitation in poetry for her to become a member of the Junior Matron Friday Club. If I wasn't so rushed I think I—I could just sit down and have a good cry. Albert, be careful of those silk sleeve garters I sent you for your wedding shirt, don't adjust them too tight; and you know how you catch cold. Don't perspire and go in a draught. And—and Albert, I see I have to remind you of little things the way I do Ben. You men with your heads so chock full of business!" (Very sotto voce.) "Send Lilly flowers this afternoon. Lilies-of-the-valley and white rosebuds. Remley's on your corner is a good place. Tell them your mother-in-law is a good customer and they'll give you a little discount…. Yes, she's upset, poor child. I was the same way. My mother almost had to shove me into the carriage. Well, Albert, call up again about noon. She'll be up by then. Good-by—son." A pox of perspiration was out over her face, sparkling forth again after each mopping. A box arrived from a jeweler's and one from a department store. They were a pie knife and a table crumber in the form of a miniature carpet sweeper. The usual futilities with which such occasions can be cluttered and which have shaped the destinies of immemorial women into a tyranny of petty things. Then Mrs. Becker hurried upstairs, her white wrapper floating after. In the bathroom her husband leaned to a mirror, his jaw line thrust to the cleave of a razor. "I really envy you, Ben. Not even your daughter's wedding day can disturb you. For a cent I could cry my eyes out. It's only excitement keeps me going. I—could—c-c-cry." "Now, now, little woman." She sat down on a hall chair, regarding him through the open bathroom door. "Has she said anything to you, Ben, since yesterday? It's made me so upset." "Now, now, little woman, you must make allowances for a young girl's nervousness." "I know, Ben, but it worries me so. It's not natural for her to have crying spells like that one yesterday." "Nonsense! I'm not so sure you weren't a red-eyed bride." "My nervousness wasn't anything like hers. She'll make herself sick." "You mean you will." "Have you heard her moving about her room yet?" "No." "Shall I knock?" "No, Carrie; now let the child alone this morning." "I never knew her to stay in bed so long. It's after eleven, and the hair dresser coming at twelve. It will seem funny, won't it, Ben, her—little room empty to-night." "Now, now, no waterworks. What if she was moving away to another city instead of just settling down across the street? You worked this thing your way, and even now you don't feel satisfied." "I do feel satisfied, Ben, but I want her to be, too." "Now, little woman, mark my word, Lilly may feel that she is doing this thing in more or less of a spirit of sacrifice to our pleasure, but inside of a week she'll be as busy and happy a little housekeeper as her mother." "Is that her calling?" "Yes. Go to her, Carrie." Out in the little upper square of hallway Lilly appeared suddenly; her hair still down in the beautiful way she let it toss about her in sleep, and her body boldly outlined in a Japanese kimono she held tightly about her. "Mamma, will you and papa please come to my room? I want to talk to you." "Your father is shaving, Lilly. Can't you talk to us out here? How is our girl on her wedding day? Frightened? You're me all over again. Ask your father if I wasn't as pale as you are." She kissed her daughter on lips that were cold, brushing back the shower of hair from her shoulders. "You ought to see the presents, Lilly, that just—" "Mamma—papa—you must listen." "Yes, Lilly." "Please, won't you let me off? Please!" Her father regarded her from behind the white mud of lather, his eyes darkening up. "Now, now, sweetheart," he said, using one of his rarest words of endearment, "this won't do at all." "But I can't, papa. I just can't. I know it's terrible, this last minute, but—but—I tell you—I can't." "My God, Ben!" "Can't what, Lilly?" "Can't! I never had such a funny—a terrible feeling. I can't explain it, only let me off. Please! It's not too late. Lots of girls have done it—found out at the last minute they couldn't—" "My God! What are we to do, Ben? Ben!" "Carrie, if only you will hold your horses I'll handle this." He mopped off his face hurriedly, sliding into a dressing gown. "Come now, Lilly, into the front room. Sit down." She moved after him with the rather groping look of the blind. "Now what is this nonsense, Lilly, you've been hinting these last few days?" "I've made a mistake, papa. I should have said so weeks—ago—from the start. It isn't Albert's fault. It isn't anybody's fault. I've had it all along, this queer feeling all through the engagement and parties, but I kept hoping for your sakes I'd get over it—hoping—in vain—" "Why, of course, Lilly, you'll get over it! It's natural for a young girl to feel—" "No! No! My feeling won't lift! If only I had said nothing the night he—proposed. But mamma was waiting up. She—she pressed me so. It was so hard the way you put it. I know he's a fine fellow. I know, papa, he's thrown big orders in your way. But I can't help being what I am. Please, papa, let me off! Please!" An actual shrinkage of face seemed to have taken place in Mrs. Becker. "What'll we do? What'll we do, Ben?" she kept repeating, rocking herself back and forth in what seemed to border on dementia. "You see, papa, it's only to be a small wedding. We could so easily call things off. I'll take all the blame—" "No! No! No!" "Mamma dear, I'm as sorry—about it as you are, but—" "No! No! She's ruining our lives, Ben—disgracing—" "Lilly, are you sure that you are telling us everything?" "I swear it, papa. I know I'm inarticulate, I don't seem able to explain the terrible state I've been in for days—" "It's nervousness, Lilly." "I tell you, no! I can't make you understand. But I'm not cut out, papa, for what I'm going to settle down to. I'm something else than what you think I am. I guess I—I am a sort of botanical sport, papa, off our family tree. I know what you're going to say, and maybe you're right. I may have more ideas than I have talent, but let me go my way. Let me be what I am." "Lilly, Lilly, let us take this thing step by step, quietly. Surely, daughter, you appreciate the enormity of the situation!" "I do. I do." "Now to go back to the beginning. Did you consent to this engagement of your own free will?" "I did and I didn't." "You didn't?" "Oh, I know you let me decide for myself, but don't you think I felt the undercurrent of your attitudes? All the other girls settling down, as you put it. You and Albert such good friends, and then Albert himself so—so what he should be." "Now you are talking. If your mother and I hadn't felt that Albert was the fine and upright man for their little girl to marry, do you think they would have—" "I know! There we go around in the circle again. Everything is perfect. The little house, Albert's promotion to first assistant. Everything perfect, but me. I don't want it. I don't love him. You hear me! There is something in me he hasn't touched. Respect him? Yes, but respect is only a poor relation to love and comes in for the left-over and the cast-off emotions." "Her head is full of the novels she reads!" "You can't keep me from thinking like a woman. Feeling like one. Is it shameful to want to love? Is it wrong to desire in the man you are to marry that fundamental passion that makes the world go around? I'm not supposed to know any thing about the thing I'm plunging into until after I've plunged! I'm afraid, papa. Save me!" "Ben, I could swear who is at the bottom of this indecent talk of hers. I found his picture cut out of the school magazine and pasted in her diary. She's a changed child since that Lindsley came to the High School the year before she graduated." "Mamma! Mamma!" fairly exploded to her feet by the potency of her sense of outrage. "Oh, you—you—" "I know I'm right." "Why, I haven't even seen him since I graduated! I've never talked ten words to the man in my life! Oh—oh—how can you?" "Just the same, he's been your ruination. Since you got him into your head not one of the boys you met has been good enough. I knew you had him in mind the day you told me you wished Albert was a little more bookish and musical. I know why you wanted him to subscribe to the Symphony. The spats you made him buy. Poor boy! and his ankles aren't cut for them. Love! Your father and I weren't so much in love, let me tell you. Only I knew my parents wanted it and that was enough. I wish to God I'd never lived to see this day—" "Carrie!" "I do. Noon of my daughter's wedding day, and she can't make up her mind whether she'll be married or not. O God! it's funny—love, now at the last minute—oh—oh—" A geyser of hysteria shot up, raining down in a glassy kind of laugh. "Oh—oh, it's funny!—love—" "Carrie, you're hysterical. Here, smell this ammonia." "The little house—my heart's blood in it. A doll's house, ready for her to walk into. Membership in the Junior Matrons—trousseau—oh, it's funny—funny—" "For God's sake, papa, try to calm her!" "Funny—funny—funny." |
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